The best map of the American Census, in my judgement, is from the New York Times. You can find it here. The best map of the Canadian Census is from OpenFile.ca. You can find it here. Many analytics practitioners have their roots in catalogs. And in the cataloging business, geography is a huge predictor. You look for exploitable geographical cleavages in electoral behavior and public opinion studies. Geo-targeting is one of the few things that many social platforms do really well. Consider the cleavage in the chart below. The darker the red, the older the population. Canada is a country without people. Lots of land. Not a lot of people. You see these very red areas in rural zones. You[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
Predictive analytics is about making statements about the future, and then enabling either an individual or a group of people to make decisions. The idea is that better decisions will be made if people have a better idea of what to expect in the future. I’m not quite as optimistic in the whole relationship between better information and better decisions. The intervening variable, the person, or worse, the group of people, are make poor choices in the face of good futures. They have their own preferences and expectations. Judgement is certainly a trait that is distributed normally in the population. Besides, Arrow’s Theorem. That’s where automatic decision systems can help. Remember the idea of Website Morphing? You can read the[…]
The social app gaming trend continues apace. The mobile app gaming trend continues too. Remember PC gaming? Me too. Steam, from Valve, is a major way that PC gamers buy and manage their games. They release statistics. And, Lauri has visualized some statistics and made them available through an interface called ‘SteamGraph‘. It’s interesting to look at substitution among successive releases of games. A game in a series will be decaying in terms of active players over time. The next one in the series is released. You see a nice big spike in the new release, and then a slow, tell-tale decay. The previous games in the series resume their cold death, but at a slowing rate. PC gaming substitution[…]
Why did I buy the Wool by Hugh Howey Saturday night sometime after 11pm? In the tradition of Deb Luneau, who impressed me some six years ago with her customer journey diary, here’s my account of the consumer journey. We had gone to see the latest Batman. If you follow me on twitter, and open twitter on the weekends, and, have me in a list that you pay attention to, then you knew that I had low expectations going in. And, the movie exceeded my expectations. We got home at around 9pm and ate Thai. I fired up Netflix at around 11pm. It recommended a movie called ‘Kick-Ass’. Bad choice. What a terrible movie. The iPad was out by 11:15pm.[…]
I read, with glazed eyes, a product announcement that called predictive analytics an ‘extreme’ technology. lolwut It’s the latest buzzword. It might stick. What comes after Big Data? Extreme Data. Thrutch. Gnarly. Grinding. Both Extreme Data and Extreme Predictive Analytics are in use. Why does this happen? It happens because we have to introduce ideas that are old to us to markets where it’s new to them. It’s expedient to present old ideas as new, because novelty spawns excitement and action. And, in many societies, excitement spawns action. It creates demand. Predictive analytics has been in professional use since at least World War II. Did that keep airlines from adopting the techniques twenty years later? Of course not. And yet,[…]
Every year I spend a day with the strategists at the eat:Strategy conference in Toronto. What strategists say and how they treat each other is interesting and predictive. I heard five different definitions of insight I heard three different definitions of strategy I heard three different definitions of brand It’s interesting because there’s discord, and that it persists. The web analysts reading this post should click this link. Yeah baby. 5 out of the 8 presentations contained web analytics results as proof points that a strategy worked. 6 out of the 8 mentioned the importance of business objectives and customer needs/wants. The term ‘ROI’ was said with contempt by 2 out of the 8 speakers. Interesting. Maybe a little bit[…]
Einstein had it wrong. The only thing that moves faster than light through a vacuum is bullshit through a social medium. Marketing scientists in academia communicate to each other through journals and presentations. The peer reviewed journal innovation was necessitated by Sir Isaac Newton, who somehow had a drawer that was filled with the ideas of others. “Oh, that’s a neat idea, too bad you didn’t come up with it first. I had written about it five years before you, see, it was in my desk all along.” He wasn’t very popular. Academic findings are loosely peer reviewed (see: biology). There’s a form of moderation there. It varies, but it’s there. Industry marketing scientists talk over beer, blogs, conferences, pdf’s[…]
Lowering technology barriers has enabled more people to comment, more often. What effect has this had? Twitter and Weibo’s, by virtue of limiting the volume of text to be shared, has enabled more people to share more. It’s given rise to link-shortening and exported more SMS language and short-form communication into the mainstream Internet. There is a tendency amongst some to believe that what you’re reading in the comments is a representation of what people think. There are good models, found in marketing science research, that suggests that people experience products, then consider whether or not they’ll post something, and then moderate their opinions based on the audience. This two-step process is fairly important, especially when it’s applied to professional[…]
Short, free-form commenting technologies has enabled more people to say more things. Many technologists prefer users respond by hitting single buttons. Liking, wanting, upvoting, downvoting, thumbs up, thumbs down, share, +1, retweeting, favouriting and so on. Facebook is entirely focused on the affirmative actions. Reddit enables both actions. These are very easy to understand, and have their intended effects. Facebook wants you to share everything. Reddit wants the best content to aggregate to the top. Commenting requires a bit more effort, in that the user usually uses keyboard to generate a comment, hitting multiple keys, and sometimes creating words or even expressing a well formed thought. And so, it must follow, there’s an attention economy around commenting. Herp Derp is[…]
Heading into an analytics interview? There are a few things you should know. Pay attention to the description A few leading hiring managers have been listing specific items outright. For instance, we used to list “Will have an opinion about Peterson’s line on cookies” right in the description. We will ask you what your opinion is on Peterson’s opinion. If you don’t have one, we assume that you will do something prior to the interview to become informed, and, come with an opinion. Different hiring managers implant different preparation questions. Pay attention and prepare. If you’re heading into a department with a good reputation, it’s because they’re all prepared. And, since like people tend to clump together, we’re looking for[…]